One hundred ways to speak with a hand fan. Opened slowly, like a demure minuet, means Wait for me. If the fan is fully expanded and fluttered wildly, then you mean all is not well and the meeting is to cease, immediately, in other words Leave the premises now! I am engaged. To let the fan glide along the cheek means I want you. And to open and close the fan fitfully means You are cruel.

Tosca’s fan was black, fringed with emerald green tips that glistened when she snapped the fan open in one swift flick of her tiny wrist. The fan and hand were one, as if she grew silk folds instead of fingers. Her fan swirled and cascaded in the still air of the grey studio, and I was in Restoration England and she had just received a dozen billets-doux from fops and cits and wits and Beaux Street beaux. Her thick black heels barely touched the concrete floor when she floated into the room, the long black skirt swinging rhythmically around her slender ankles. Her back and shoulders square, never angling or dipping, as if all that existed was that fan, her dark fluttering lashes, and the dancing skirt. Madame Tosca Fedro, my 80 year-old period style teacher, had arrived.

The men, on the other hand, spoke with white lace handkerchiefs, flicking them up to their snuffed noses or twirling them in wide circles as they bowed at the waist, right foot pointed and leg as straight as Madame Tosca’s back, the back leg bent. The men in the class also wore heels, learning to float and never stir their curled wigs that spiraled over velvet waistcoats like fluffy dead snakes.

The class pranced and preened for one hour every morning at 10 under Fedro’s strict regime: stand, walk, sit, curtsy or bow, flick the fan or handkerchief – all in the barest of movements, all-a-piece, no excess, absolute adherence to order and propriety. Performing in Restoration comedy – Moliere’s “The Misanthrope” or as I did in Congreve’s “Love for Love” − left no room for error, economy coveted, no elopement from ritual. Tosca would know, I thought, she must have lived at court during that time, she was that ancient.

Impossible of course, but at 18 and fresh off the boat (in my case first time in an airplane) a small town country girl in London, alone, studying under a Russian princess, what else was I to think? Later, Tosca at 84 would marry my boyfriend Eric, 26, also an American like me. Eric married her because he wanted to stay in Britain to work, and Tosca? It’s anyone’s guess why, though I’ve my suspicions. Eric was frankly gorgeous and quite aristocratic himself – Eric von Starck, though later he dropped the von after Tosca died and he returned to the States to run a successful catering business in Boulder, Colorado. I learned all this when I met him 30 years after we’d graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. By then I too had given up theatre, and like Eric, saw through its egocentric exterior right to the bones of its insecure insides, riddled with competition and angst.

But with Tosca, in the three years we trained with her, I for one lived in a fantasy world so exacting and exhilarating that the thrill lives in me still. When she took me under her wing as her “special project,” insisting I call her Tosca rather than Madame Tosca Fedro like everyone else, I’d always assumed it was because I’d trained as a dancer in New York and had fluidity and intuition to understand the intricacies of a coy curtsey over a defiant one. But when I learned from Eric that they’d married after I returned to the States, I suspected she targeted me because Eric and I were lovers and her intimacy with me and how she championed me over the 14 other talented actors in my class, telling me secretly (why not an announcement to the rest of the school?) that I was the best actor and should be awarded as such. The school did give out awards but I didn’t receive that one.

Madame Tosca Fedro and Eric von Starck. Did they become Monsieur and Madame von Starck? Did they have sex? Eric was a sexy lover, innovative and radical for me. We made love during my periods and in the bathtub. On the floor and in London cabs. He picked me up one night in one of those roomy black taxis that made you feel as if you were riding in a 40’s Bentley, with wide back windows and high leather seats (real leather?). I was wearing an old mink coat I’d found in a thrift shop on Tottenham Court Road, with absolutely nothing on underneath, which was why he took me, discreetly, in the back seat of the cab. Eric was always discreet, fingering me in the restaurant at dinner that same night while the waiter served our anisette in flames. Eric knew things like flaming anisette and discreet sex in fancy restaurants. And I was a quick study; curtsying to a beaux with the fan in full-sail over my heaving breast in a stingy corset, while lifting the love note from my cleavage − Meet me at 2 am in the rose arbor – slipping it to him that he grasped with the lacey edges of his dangling handkerchief, while I never moved my shoulders nor angled my back one sliver of an inch. Discretion is the key to brilliant period style acting, and getting away with a whole lot of unacceptable behavior for 1695 and other equally unacceptable behavior in the 21^st century, like an 84 year-old woman marrying my 26 year-old boyfriend, even if she was an authentic Russian princess, descendant of the Czar. Maybe she was the Anastasia, as Tosca used to always tell me. She had discretion down to a precise, disciplined, and ever so elegant art form. Never suspect.

– Dian Parker